Corruption Scandals Rock Kenyan Leadership

Copyright © 2009 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

There's another round of corruption scandals in the East African nation of Kenya. President Mwai Kibaki came to power promising to root out corruption. Now, three of his own cabinet members have resigned over corruption allegations, including two just yesterday. David McGuffin reports from Nairobi.

DAVID MCGUFFIN reporting:

President Mwai Kibaki said in a national broadcast on Monday that he'd accepted the resignations of his minister for education, George Saitoti, as well as his minister for energy, Kiraitu Murungi, follow up from investigations into two separate corruption scandals.

President MWAI KIBAKI (Kenya): I urge all Kenyans to exercise patience as the relevant arms of the (unintelligible) carry out two investigations into these issues.

MCGUFFIN: The issues are scams, one born during his presidency, and one during the previous presidency of Daniel arap Moi. That one, called the Goldenberg Affair, involved a billion dollar scheme, in which public funds were stolen in bogus gold and diamond exports. Saitoti was Moi's finance minister at the time.

Murungi's name is linked to a more recent scandal, the so-called Anglo Leasing scam, involving tens of millions of dollars of false tenders to a fictitious firm for passports, forensic laboratories, and a navy ship. Former anti-corruption czar John Githongo investigated that scam before fleeing to Britain in 2005, after receiving, what he said, were death threats. Now based in Britain, he has begun leaking information from his files to the Kenyan media, and gave his first interview since leaving to the BBC last week. In it, he spoke of a web of corruption within Kenya's government.

Mr. JOHN GITHONGO (Former Anti-Corruption Czar, Kenya): In many of the cases, the government had contracted entities that did not exist, fictitious companies, so we had no legal recourse.

MCGUFFIN: He began to uncover massive overpayments on defense contracts, and a system of kickbacks that touched many senior members of government. The follow-up from his report has dominated the Kenyan media for weeks, with daily calls for the resignation of cabinet ministers. Kenyan opposition lawmakers debriefed Githongo in London this weekend, and said they were shocked by the details. They're demanding Parliament be reconvened for an emergency session.

For Kenyans, all this marks a massive letdown. When Kibaki was swept to power in 2002, he promised a better future.

(Soundbite of President Kibaki's speech)

President KIBAIKI: Corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya.

MCGUFFIN: Kibaki has had the details of Githongo's files for a year, but still reappointed many of the ministers named in them to a new cabinet last November. Wangethi Mwangi, editorial director of Nairobi's Nation Newspaper which broke the scandal, says ultimately, Kibaki bears responsibility.

Mr. WANGETHI MWANGI (Editorial Director, 'Nation' Newspaper): To extent that he has not done anything since November, I think one can safely say that he cannot escape blame for this unrelenting fiasco.

MCGUFFIN: In addition to sucking much needed funds out of the government's coiffeurs, the scandals have prompted the World Bank to suspend $260 million in loans. With pressure on the government here building, the small grains of hope that Kenyans may take from all this is that perhaps the next government will view fighting corruption as something more than just a campaign slogan.

For NPR News, I'm David McGuffin, in Nairobi.

Copyright ©2009 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.